Increasing Volunteer Participation on the Firefox for Android Team

Aug 6, 2013

Over the past year, the Firefox for Android team has really seen increased volunteer participation. It’s been amazing to see our community grow, and I want to share some of the strategies we’ve been using to engage volunteers.

1. Make it easy to get started. We maintain a “Get Involved” page with links to a bunch of resources to help newcomers get started, including clear and up-to-date build instructions. We also share some guidelines for how exactly to get started, including things like making sure you have a build environment set up before trying to dive into a bug, and how to reach out to us when you need help.

2. Be available to help. Our team is always on IRC, and we’re quick to answer questions. We also make an effort to respond to Bugzilla comments/requests in a timely fashion, especially if we see it’s someone’s first bug. Helping newcomers can require patience, but being responsive is a really important part of keeping volunteers engaged.

3. Create contribution opportunities. We mark bugs as mentor bugs as often as we can. In addition to simple “good first bugs”, we also try to mark more challenging bugs as mentor opportunities. The key with that is to set clear expectations about how challenging we expect the bug to be, and redirect newcomers to easier bugs if they find themselves in one that’s too hard.

4. Recognize contributors. We made a “Friends of the Mobile Team” section of our weekly meeting notes, where we call out volunteer contributions that were made over the past week. We recently created a badge that we award to anyone who appears in this section (people love badges!) and we also try to publicize important contributions with our @FennecNightly Twitter account.

5. Develop a culture of mentorship. This last point is a bit harder to act on, but it’s the most important. A big part of why we have more (and stronger) volunteer contributors is that we’ve taken the time to mentor them. On our team, most developers have mentored at least one bug (if not many), and make an effort to mark bugs as mentor bugs whenever they can. We also make a big effort to remain patient and friendly, and I think that attitude has spread through our community. One of the greatest rewards of developing this culture is seeing new contributors evolve into mentors themselves. It is an amazing feeling to watch some of the volunteers I mentored helping newcomers write their first patches, and do so with so much kindness and patience.

I’ve been having lots of fun bringing new people into our team, and I’d love to help other teams at Mozilla do the same. Please reach out to me if you have any questions, or share any other tips I may have omitted in the comments below!